Fleetster wins the Mobility Cluster at the international business start-up festival Bits & Pretzels

10 October 2017

One pitch, three foils in three minutes. These were the guidelines for the remaining 100 start-up companies that competed against each other from all over Europe and America last weekend at the international Bits & Pretzels meeting for founders in Munich. 500 start-ups had applied in the previous months and the remaining competitors left no doubt that everyone wanted to win.

The 100 start-ups that made it to the semi-finals competed against each other in six categories:

Commerce & Market Place

Mobility & Transportation

Entertainment & Lifestyle

Hardware & IoT

Services & Intelligence

Banking & Insurance

In the category "Mobility & Transportation" Tim Ruhoff, Managing Director of fleetster, competed to convince the top-class jury of European investors of his idea. "It was hard going. Some companies are building artificial intelligence for driverless cars, others design laser sensors, logistics platforms for better capacity utilization and many digital apps," Ruhoff said, who was again able to present his idea in the final after his appearance in front of 5,000 participants.

The special thing about fleetster's history is that the company basically launched its carsharing solution for electric cars in vehicle fleets too early. "Five years ago, there simply weren't enough vehicles to make money with," Ruhoff says. So the company had to act quickly because the money for the software developers' salaries was not unlimited. Therefore, the software was extended to include additional functions for vehicle fleets in order to address a larger market. However, this was not enough either, because fleetster's price structure assumes that millions of vehicles would use the system at a reasonable price.

Three years ago, the company therefore began to build its software in such a way that not only carsharing services but also different applications such as fleet management and car rental can be organized with just one platform. It was precisely this platform and its features that were the focus of the pitch, such as the fact that its design can be fully adapted to any company. In this way, it is already being used successfully by German vehicle manufacturers.

For everyone who wants to know what the fleetster team is planning for next year: At this year's fleetster Reloaded Event on 23 November 2017 in Munich, Tim Ruhoff will tell you exactly that in his keynote!